ambiguous gestures

i adore the feeling of a pencil

within my fist,

the yellow-painted wood

smooth against my skin,

drawing out my ideas

in loops and lines and spirals

of gray on white.

i treasure the feeling of a keyboard

beneath my fingertips,

the ridges on f and j

holding me in place

as my thoughts run out

through my hands

and trickle across the screen.

the written word

feels familiar to me.

the ideas and thoughts

appear in my mind,

plucked from the dictionary that resides, 

dog-eared and heavily annotated,

within my head.

the words appear in front of me,

something insubstantial turned concrete.

the spoken word

seems foreign to me.

the ideas and thoughts

appear in my head

but are held back by my tongue

as it struggles to shape the words

that i can no longer find

in the worn pages of my dictionary.

but my hands know what it is

to make something imagined

become realized,

and they form the words in silence,

a display of ambiguous gestures

writing out the words

that my tongue cannot say.